Coal is the only sustainable fuel, at scale, that can provide for the world's growing electricity needs, said Greg Boyce, chairman and chief executive officer of Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company, in a keynote Thursday speech at CERAWeek in Houston.

The conference, in its 30th year, is sponsored by Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

"Coal is powering both the largest and best global economies and this is no coincidence," Boyce said. "The correlation between coal-fueled electricity use and economic growth is near-perfect."

Approximately 90 percent of coal's 4 billion tons of demand growth by 2030 will come from emerging economies in Asia, he said. The world has "trillions" of tons of coal, he said, which account for 60 percent of global energy resources.

Howard Gatiss, chief executive of Dublin's Coal Marketing Co., said coal would feature prominently in the energy mix of the future.

"Let us accept that this is an important part of our future, that the resources are there, that it is a commodity that can be mined in a responsible and acceptable way and that it can be a very important part of the generation portfolio ... for many generations to come," he said, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Gatiss said that sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-based power generation don't pose a problem as they did 40 years ago. Now "scrubbers can simply deal with that issue," he said, and the technology exists to deal with carbon dioxide and other emissions.

Boyce claimed that replacing older coal plants in the United States with advanced generation would translate into $1.2 trillion in economic benefits and 6 million jobs during the construction phase. Some 440 million metric tons of carbon dioxide would also be avoided, he said.

Gary Nedelka, president and chief executive officer of the global power group at Foster Wheeler, said carbon capture and sequestration technology, when perfected, could pave the way for coal-based electricity at a cheaper price than natural gas.

In the United States, coal will continue to be the dominant energy source for electricity production through 2035, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While EIA projects that the mix of electricity-generating sources will change significantly by 2035 -- with natural gas rising 37 percent and renewable rising 73 percent -- coal's share of the energy mix will drop from 45 percent to 43 percent.

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